When Derrida wrote Spectres of Marx in the 90s, triumphalist neoliberalism, succeeding the collapse of Communism in the West, was ready to treat Marx and Marxism as an intellectual frolic, of no more importance, now, than Madame Blavatsky. Derrida, to his eternal credit, rediscovered the Gothic vocabulary within which Marx’s rhetoric was immersed, and took the spectre and haunting as ways of mediating a sense that we had somehow missed, as a culture, the alternative future we had worked for and expected. We, so to speak, stood the better angels of our nature up against the wall, executed them, and had the servants drag them away and bury them.
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Friday, November 17, 2023
The spectre and the soul: from Derrida to Netflix
Monday, November 13, 2023
The marriage crisis game
A funny thing happened on the way to the
marriage crisis.
In the Reagan years, as Susan Faludi
explains in her book, Backlash, a study that seemed to show that college
educated women faced a “marriage crunch” in the “marriage market” got
saturation coverage in the press, which was well satisfied with the idea
that feminism ruined everything.
The numbers were bogus – it turned out that
the study that showed the marriage crunch used doubtful assumptions and was
disputed by numerous other studies – but it turned out that this didn’t matter.
The rightwing phobic reaction to feminism attached itself to the study
symptomatically, the way a panicked child might clutch a teddy bear, and it was
not about to have its symbol taken from it.
Periodically, since, the right has stirred
up marriage crises, on the principle that you can never gull the folks too
much, enunciated by the immortal words of the Duke and Dauphin in Huckleberry
Finn, whose signs advertising “The Royal Nonsuch” contained the sentence: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED. “If that don’t
draw em,” the Duke said, “I don’t know Arkansaw.”
Arkansaw has become national
since Mark Twain’s time, and it is populated mainly by men who, between bemoaning
the fact that the guv’mint only favors blacks and that elections are frauds,
also throw in a bit about ugly feminist women. Arkansaw is like that.
However, the message about the “marriage
market” – a phrase that wreaks of the University of Chicago economics
department – has, funnily enough, begun to fall on deaf ears. The distaff side –
all those women out there – have had enough.
One feels the desperation
creeping into the Royal Nonesuch. The American Enterprise Institute, that
beacon of University of Chicago thinking, has been sponsoring something called
the National Marriage Project. One of its members, a UVA prof named Brad
Wilcox, has written a book whose very title is a Fox News anxiety dream: GET
MARRIED: Why Americans must defy the elites and tax the wealthy at a ninety percent
rate… oops, got that title wrong. Here it is: “why Americans must defy the
elites, forge strong families, and save civilization.” The AEI, as is well
known, loves them some civilization, the saving of which cannot, however,
involve peace, saving the earth from climate change catastrophe, or taxing the
wealthiest.
But how bout that marriage,
ladies?
I was pleased to see that this
book, which comes out, heh heh on Valentine’s Day, received a pre-emptive first
strike by Anna Louie Sussman on the NYT opinion page: She points out some simple things. For instance, the absolutely rotten state of
Arkansaw, i.e. American malehood.
“But harping on people to get married from
high up in the ivory tower fails to engage with the reality on the ground that
heterosexual women from many walks of life confront: that is, the state of men
today. Having written about gender, dating, and reproduction for years, I’m
struck by how blithely these admonitions to get married skate over people’s
lived experience. A more granular look at what the reality of dating looks and
feels like for straight women can go a long way toward explaining why marriage
rates are lower than policy scholars would prefer.”
She does not go into the reasons for this,
but I would venture a few – all of which are tied to the Neoliberal culture.
Let’s pick one: the decline and the abasement,
from the poohbahs on high, of culture and the humanities.
The very terms that the Chicago school
employs – the marketization of everything – is a part of this culture. The
market model seems more engineering like, more scientific. It isn’t. It is a
pretty lousy model for marriage in the age of the love marriage – a model that
grew up in the developed countries and became dominant for most people in the
19th century. Without dowries, without the patriarchal household,
marriage becomes something very different. It becomes, I would say, a different
story.
The story – romance, soap opera, tragedy,
comedy – is at the heart of the love marriage. And stories and songs are just
the kind of thing that the new Dukes and Dauphins find laughable. Educate your
kids with stories and songs? Where is the hard science that’s gonna make them
docile button pushers?
The narrative deficit in the U.S. is very
gender-defined. Men don’t read. Men have an amazing paucity of critical
capacity to analyze language or larger narrative patterns. Men tend to think
that there is some fatal, ontological divide between the intellect and feeling.
Etc., etc.
Of course, this is not true of all men. But it is true that the right has long
defined itself in terms of its attack on the humanities and all that has
developed under its aegis. In a sense, the right does have a good sense of its
enemies. Although teaching the college kids to deconstruct Twelfth Night does
not seem like it would threaten the larger structures of capitalism or
patriarchy, historically, one of the important feeders into the civil rights
movement for women in the seventies was, precisely, English departments at
universities. In France, at the moment, post-colonial studies and gender studies
are under attack by the usual suspects, because these threaten the premises of
France’s neo-colonialist attitude to the South and, as well, promise to shake
up the massive gender imbalances within French organizations.
Neoliberal culture is not just about University
of Chicago economics. What makes it “neo” is that the culture tries to
integrate the gains of the civil rights movement and the deregulated economy of
global capitalism. This is an understudied part of the culture. At a certain
point, the contradictions between these movements and the thrust of capitalism
surface. They surface on the left and the right. On the right, we can see this
surfacing in the use of “elites”. These elites are not defined by Capital –
they are defined by the attempt, however weak, to continue the gains of the
civil rights movement.
Sussman’s piece doesn’t go here, but it
could. Sussman quotes the AEI’s Brian Cox in part of the article:
Navigating interpersonal relationships in a
time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional
sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the
experience,” he added. He had recently read about a high school creative
writing assignment in which boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the
perspective of the opposite sex. While girls wrote detailed essays showing they
had already spent significant time thinking about the subject, many boys simply
refused to do the exercise, or did so resentfully. Mr. Cox likened that to
heterosexual relationships today: “The girls do extra and the boys do little or
nothing.”
What is this “doing”? It is imagining. It is
narrating. It is the old, old business of singing songs and telling stories.
Which, after finding food, drink and shelter is one of our oldest needs. Maslow’s
ladder needs a redo. What happens when you strip the dignity from singing songs
and telling stories?
Well, we are living in an experiment to find
out.
Routines, rituals and the post-identity moment
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